Life as a Physicist

See CERN History December 1, 2009

This is a quick note to draw your attention to a small retrospective program that CERN has put together – “From the Proton Synchroton to the Large Hadron Collider – 50 Years of Nobel Memories in High-Energy Physics” – yeah, yeah, it is like a Microsoft product name, but check out the list of speakers – 13 of them are Nobel prize winners. And these are all “memory” talks – so they should be quite entertaining. The event will be video-broadcast over the internet – a link should appear in that agenda page where you can watch. The time is European central – which is 9 hours ahead of Pacific time in the USA.

The context for this event is the turn-on of the LHC, of course. The accelerator recently took the title of “most powerful accelerator in the world” away from Fermilab – and is on its way to a turn-on and real data. Ironically, I was on shift at Fermilab a few hours before this event happened – my plan was to call up the ATLAS control room if it did happen and congratulate them… but I was asleep by the time it actually happened.

I’m at CERN now – and the atmosphere is electric. This review talk is a perfect stepping stone for the future.

Hi Mike – yes, you are right. The LHC is proton-on-proton, not anti-proton-on-proton. So at the same energy the Tevatron is more likely to produce various rare decay products than the lhc. In some cases it will take a x3 times more energy to make the same thing at the LHF.

Thanks. I just saw some of these. Classic t’Hooft. Pushing BH in addition to Higgs while pretending GHK does not exist. I sure he doesn’t recognize APS or the Sakurai Prize either as any sort of authority on topic. He forgets that he and Veltman referenced all three in their Nobel winning paper.